Dr. Clare Gerada was featured in yesterday’s NHS news review discussing the Health and Social Care / Destroy the NHS Bill incentivising GPs to restrict treatment and the consequent pressures on the relationship between GPs and their patients. The RCGP Annual Conference at Liverpool is to discuss similar issues later today
http://www.rcgp.org.uk/PDF/Programme%20for%20web%20OCT.pdf
The moral maze: the affordability of future health care
Chair: Dr Richard Horton, Editor, Lancet
Panel of speaker to be confirmed:
Baroness Julia Cumberlege
Dr Clare Gerada, Chair of Council, RCGP
Sir Michael Rawlins, Chairman, NICE
Ben Page, Chief Executive, Ipsos MORI
Dr Hamish Meldrum, Chairman of Council, BMA
Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) accuses the ConDem coalition of destroying the NHS.
- Conservative election poster 2010
A recent news article about the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat (Conservative) coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.
BBC News – SNP conference: UK government ‘breaking up NHS’
Scotland’s health secretary will accuse the UK government of trying to break up the NHS, in her speech to the SNP conference.
Nicola Sturgeon will tell delegates in Inverness that health service reforms in England amount to an experiment in privatisation.
Scottish ministers say they will protect NHS spending.
Deputy SNP leader Ms Sturgeon will also pledge to stop pensioners languishing in hospital beds.
The UK government’s controversial Health and Social Care Bill aims to increase competition and give clinicians control of budgets.
It says the changes are vital to help the NHS cope with the demands of an ageing population, the costs of new drugs and treatments and the impact of lifestyle factors, such as obesity.
But the legislation has already been substantially altered, following criticism from NHS staff and Liberal Democrat MPs.
Ms Sturgeon, who is also Scotland’s deputy first minister, will tell day two of the conference: “It now seems inevitable that the Tories, aided and abetted by their Liberal partners, will break up the NHS in England.
“Let me make this clear, the NHS in Scotland will remain a public service, paid for by the public and accountable to the public.
“There will be no privatisation of the NHS in Scotland.”
The health secretary will say: “I say that not out of blind ideology, though I have always thought that the ideology of a health service in public hands and free at the point of need is a rather fine one, I say it because I have no doubt that our NHS can and will outperform the privatised experiment south of the border.”
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